Maya Lin's Moment

TALK story about the architect and sculptor Maya Lin and her new work, which will be unveiled later this summer in a corner of Pennsylvania Station. Maya Lin has been famous around the world for thirteen years as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Maya Lin was only twenty-one, and a Yale undergraduate, when she beat out dozens of famous architects and won a national competition for the design of the Memorial. All her recent work, however--still quiet, still intimate, still intense--has to do with underlining the everydayness of life. One morning last week, we went down to the Bowery to visit her, in the loft she lives and works in, and to talk about her latest project, which has been five years in the making--a gorgeous overhead solar system of a clock she calls "Eclipsed Time." The clock will be in the Long Island Rail Road portion of the station, which now, three decades after New York lost its original Penn Station, is seeing many long-overdue improvements, among them a vaulted concourse that has been fitted with marble walls and filled with light; the station's first new entrance in years and years; and an application of StoneLok, a new coating for granite floors which repels chewing gum. The centerpiece of all this unexpected betterment is to be the clock, a project that was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program. The clock is positioned fifteen feet above commuters' heads, right at the point where the new entrance and the old concourse intersect, and at first glance it looks nothing at all like a clock, but like a sort of modern-day flat, ceiling-mounted sundial. Inside a giant oval is a whitely glowing frosted-glass disk, with the numbers one through eleven etched across it. A second disk, this one of lacquered aluminum, slides its way across the glass and the numbers, eclipsing them, and marking the hours. Maya Lin said her assignment was not to design anything that you could sit on or sleep on or that would slow people down when they were galloping for a train.